Daily Dive: Should You Buy Low on Kyle Tucker?

Mike Kurland dives into the batting profile of Houston Astros OF Kyle Tucker to project his fantasy baseball value going forward in the 2021 MLB season.

The idea of this article is to discuss, in depth, a specific player’s current profile and production. We will dive into why he is succeeding or struggling and discuss if there are reasons for concern or brighter days ahead.

The intention here is to figure out what is going on and if there is a way to fix it or if we should ring the alarm bells in fantasy leagues. We are taking a quick look under the hood.  

Next up is Houston Astros outfielder Kyle Tucker.

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Kyle Tucker, OF, Houston Astro’s

Kyle Tucker is known at this point for being unlucky so far this season. But is there more to that bad luck or is it simply bad luck? The goal here is to dive in and see if we can find out. 

Tucker is still managing to provide power and speed production with six home runs and two stolen bases. This unfortunately comes with a .192 batting average and a .666 OPS. These are less than desirable to say the least. The batting average is not being helped by the .187 BABIP. This is coming off of two-straight seasons of a BABIP north of .300 (.303 and .326). This suggests correction is incoming. While we continue to look at the surface stats, the K% is 19% and the walk rate is 8.8%. These are both actually improvements on the 2020 numbers and shows he’s continuing to improve the plate discipline. 

Diving into the plate discipline a bit further it’s almost identical to 2020. 

With little to takeaway from the plate discipline, we shift our focus to the batted ball profile.

Tucker has dropped the line drive rate by 1.4 points down to 18.8%. This has increased the fly ball rate by a point to 42.7% and the ground ball rate by 0.5 points to 38.5%. So essentially, very little has changed here. However, the 34% pull rate might be causing issues as those fly balls are not going to play up if he continues to hit the ball 43.3% of the time up the middle. This is the first notable change in the production.

This is the first time in his career (including the minors) that he’s had a cent% that high. This is also the lowest pull rate of his career as well. The lowest pull rate prior to this year was in 2019 in Triple A and that was 41.8%. This could help explain some of the BABIP and batting average dip because fly balls going to center field more will mostly end in outs. However, given the track record we should expect a change in approach and when he gets back to pulling the ball more we could see the results trend back towards the norm. 

The average launch angle is 18.9 degrees. This is the highest of his career and this comes with the second highest pop-up rate of his career at 9.5%. Although the barrel rate has improved from 9.1% in 2020 to 10.5% in 2020, Tucker is hitting less balls on the sweet spot as the SwSp% is down from 34.1% in 2020 to 30.5% in 2021. So there is some give and take happening here. 

For those unaware of what sweet spot rate is, here’s the definition. 

A lot of the issues appear to be just bad luck. The expected stats suggest he should be better in every single category and by a wide margin. 

There is even more bad luck against fastballs and offspeed pitches. 

Yes, he has been slightly overperforming against offspeed pitches but the amount he has underperformed against the others far outweighs this small overachievement.

Although I tried to nitpick, it is difficult to see a reason to suggest Kyle Tucker has been anything other than unlucky. I would bet on correction. Buying low on Tucker is the move I would make. 

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